Sunday, 10 April 2016

Easy Motion Tourist: The Nigerian Police in Crime Fiction

A murder is
reported. You are a policeman. You arrive on the scene, you and half a dozen
other armed officers. Indeed there is a body. But there are no witnesses. The
corpse is bloated and festering on the pavement of a bridge. It has been there
for a while, cooking under the relentless African sun. Lorries, vans, trailers,
and motorcycles speed past, only slowing down slightly due to the parked police
van. Meters ahead and behind on the pavement, as far as the odour of
putrefaction is carried, pedestrians cross the dangerously impatient traffic to
get to the other side, and there they carry on. Nobody stops. They see the
body, they place their palms over their noses, but they don’t stop. It is not anything
new for them and it is not their problem.

Your colleagues
are taking pictures with their mobile phones. You go in for a closer look. What
makes this one interesting enough to share with phone contacts?

The discoloured
corpse is female. Naked, as such dumped bodies tend to be. Perhaps it was
clothed when it was first dumped on the bridge. Perhaps the road people;
beggars, hawkers, thieves, stripped it of clothes and shoes it no longer
needed. The body appears intact. Eyes: check. Breasts: check. Incisions: none.
Strange. But maybe the tongue. Maybe that’s all they took. You lean in for an
even closer look. You're holding your breath but the offensive odour still
registers. The mouth does not look disturbed. You can’t be sure if the purplish
dark brown of the lips is blood or just decay. Lipstick? You won't know for
sure until you look inside the mouth. A fly rises quickly to your face.
You swat but it lands on your cheek.

You turn from the
body and walk away as you scrub the spot on your cheek with your handkerchief.
You spit on the cloth and scrub again. You fold it inside out, spit, and scrub
again, then you throw it far from you, over the side of the bridge and into the
lagoon. You’re done.

Maybe they took
her tongue; maybe they didn’t. But it's not your problem. It’s no one's
problem. In fact, you’re only there because a caller to a morning radio show
complained of a body on the bridge. He called on his mobile from his car on his
way to work. Phoning and driving. An offence. The self-righteous show host then
called the chief of the local police station. On air! Then your boss, the
chief, had no choice but to promise, on air, to send her boys to investigate.
But everyone knows that no one investigates a naked, butchered body dumped on
the road. Or bridge. Well, maybe this one is different. Maybe they didn’t even
take the tongue. Maybe it was a hit and run. A hit and run that may or may not
have been witnessed. Witnesses who, if identified, might mention the make and
colour of a car. Maybe even the registration number.

You had
suggested, when your boss got off the phone from the radio show presenter and
after she finished questioning the intelligence of the minister of police whose
decision it was to publish the mobile phone numbers of all police officers
above a certain rank, that the matter be passed on to the environmental agency.
‘It is their job, after all’. And thus you secured your ride in the police van
that carried you to the scene because, as your boss, who had just been spoken
down to by a common radio presenter, reminded you, in case you had forgotten,
‘It is the job of the police to investigate all crimes.’ Not just crimes with a
known suspect and reliable witnesses. Not just crimes where the motive is clear
and arrests are guaranteed. Not just ‘open and close’ cases. All crimes.

As you walk
further away from the naked corpse, spitting because you can now taste the
odour, paranoid over the spot on your cheek where the fly had landed, you
fantasise about collecting fingerprints post mortem, combing the body for alien
DNA, running the prints and DNA through a database, finding a match and a
suspect. Doing your job. But it's all fantasy because there is no national
database to query. There is no lab to process the body. There is no lab to process
gathered materials and isolate DNA. Your investigation is over - you have seen
the body. You will now call the environmental agency and they will arrive at
their own convenience to remove the body destined for an unmarked grave or the
cadaver market.

There will be no
investigation. The victim is unknown. The murderer is unknown. And in this
case, with no apparent body parts missing, the motive is unknown. Perhaps the
coroner would determine a cause of death. Perhaps not. Perhaps the shaven head
means something, perhaps not. Perhaps they now use hair as well. But why kill a
person just for their hair?

They are people
who deal in human body parts for rituals. Wealth magic. Power magic. Protection
magic. And you are a Nigerian policeman. Underpaid, under-trained,
under-equipped. And I am a writer. A Nigerian author. My genre is crime
fiction. Between you and them, do you see my problem? How do I write a
recognisable police procedural? My debut novel does just that, and truthfully
too, as a subplot to a far more macabre plot: the illicit trade in human body
parts.

More information about Leye Adenle and his writing can be found on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @